(Reuters) – A U.S. appeals court on Monday allowed a research center affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University to keep patents potentially worth billions of dollars on a groundbreaking gene editing technology known as CRISPR.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the validity of the Harvard and MIT patents, rejecting a challenge brought by a rival team of researchers associated with the University of California at Berkeley and University of Vienna in Austria.

Shares of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Editas Medicine Inc, a biotechnology company that licenses Harvard and MIT’s CRISPR-related patents, rose more than three percent to $31.25 after the ruling.